Mathematicians Be Like:

funfact: in poland nobody really cares about eye contact, maybe other than people who want to have an intimate conversation with you like you'd have during a date or something

I was genuinely suprised when I learned that avoiding eye contact is a symptom of autism, because I didn't notice anybody ever trying to make it. I started paying attention to this whole thing after my diagnosis, where the doctor asked if I always look at the walls while talking to people. it turns out that people indeed are trying to look into my eyes even during the most mundane and routine interactions, but nobody (other than my now ex boyfriend who was so sad when he found out that I perceive eye contact as a threat) ever pointed it out as something that I should do. but then I see (presumably american or just non-polish) people talking about being offended by someone not making eye contact and I experience a massive cultural shock lol

girl i am not looking at your tits i prommy i just hate eye contact

when i think about the value of studying math for so many years, i don't really think it comes from the specific subjects i studied. i mean, okay, derivatives and also linear algebra do come up every now and then.

but for the most part, the probability that any specific piece of math knowledge will be relevant for any given problem in life is pretty small. studying math feels less about learning mathematics and more about training that part of your brain that does the math, and you have to learn new parts of math because you have to keep finding new things to train on.

i have some knowledge, sure, but most of it is functionally useless. the real value is in the building of some intuition about how certain types of problems "should" work, and also how to formalize and communicate that intuition to other people (or to a compiler)

guy next to me at work is french and fucking insufferable about it. "chebyshev's inequality? i'm not familiar... do you perhaps mean l'inégalité de bienaymé-tchebychev?" "snell's law? i only know of snell-descartes.." every day he emails me a list of all fields medalists from l'école normale supérieure

oh and there is the dual thing: sometimes you just know that the professor hates the subject. like when I was taking one of the analysis courses, where the lecture was with one professor and the tutorials were with a different one

at the lectures we were two months into measure theory while at the tutorials haven't even started doing exercises on that topic, but oh it was fine, still plenty of time, he knows what he's doing – we thought, like fools. then the midterm was announced, two weeks left, we still haven't started measure theory. then it was one week left, so the professor tried to solve some lebesgue integrals with us, but he got so bored with each example that he hasn't finished a single one. at this point we just hoped that maybe measure theory just won't be on the midterm, it was too late to do anything. well, unfortunately, the midterm consisted mostly of measure theory problems, it made sense because that was the main content of the course

the professor was clearly very passionate about hating measure theory

One of the really amusing things about college is that if you pay attention you sometimes can discern some of your professor's favorite pet concepts.

For instance, in my Topology course this semester, the Zariski topology has come up at least once in every single homework set so far, and in multiple lectures.

And okay, that's not that weird. The Zariski topology is a really important object in a LOT of fields, especially algebraic geometry. And discussing it at length is a really pedagogically sound move because the Zariski topology is a good example of a topology with a very well motivated structure (the closed sets are the algebraic sets!) that still very naturally gives rise to a lot of strange features, like the way all open sets in the standard topology are Zariski-dense. It was quite effective at startling me out of the complacency of unconsciously basing my intuition of how topologies behave entirely on the standard topology on the reals. So my professor bringing up Zariski so often doesn't necessarily mean he has any special affection for it.

except...

My professor writes many of the homework problems himself. Not all of them - the less interesting ones he lifts from the textbook- but some. Well, every single Zariski topology question I've encountered so far is an original from this guy. I know because the all the questions he writes personally have paragraphs of commentary contextualizing why he thinks the problem is interesting and where the ideas in the problem are going later in the course. And well- let's just say the asides on the Zariski topology have been copious indeed

AND THEN there's the way he talks about the Zariski topology in class! It's with this blend of enthusiasm and fascination only comparable to the way I've seen tumblrites talk about their blorbos. Like hey! Come behold this sgrungy little guy! Isn't he fucked up? Isn't he marvelous? And I look and I can only conclude YEAH that is indeed a spectacular specimen, he's so strange, I want to put him in a terrarium and study him (and then I get to! In my homeworks!)

Anyways. It makes me really happy picking up on how excited my professor is to share this topology with us. I'm kind of baffled that people assume math is a boring field full of boring people when there exist folks like my professor who get this passionate about a topology!

fields of mathematics

number theory: The Queen of Mathematics, in that it takes a lot from other fields and provides little in return, and people are weirdly sentimental about it.

combinatorics: Somehow simultaneously the kind of people who get really excited about Martin Gardner puzzles and very serious no-nonsense types who don’t care about understanding why something is true as long as they can prove that it’s true.

algebraic geometry: Here’s an interesting metaphor, and here’s several thousand pages of work fleshing it out.

differential geometry: There’s a lot of really cool stuff built on top of a lot of boring technical details, but they frequently fill entire textbooks or courses full of just the boring stuff, and they seem to think students will find this interesting in itself rather than as a necessary prerequisite to something better. So there’s definitely something wrong with them.

category theory: They don’t really seem to understand that the point of generalizing a result is so that you can apply it to other situations.

differential equations: physicists

real analysis: What if we took the most boring parts of a proof and just spent all our time studying those?

point-set topology: See real analysis, but less relevant to the real world.

complex analysis: Sorcery. I thought it seemed like sorcery because I didn’t know much about it, but then I learned more, and now the stuff I learned just seems like sorcery that I know how to do.

algebraic topology: Some of them are part of a conspiracy with category theorists to take over mathematics. I’m pretty sure that most algebraic topologists aren’t involved in that, but I don’t really know what else they’re up to.

functional analysis: Like real analysis but with category theorists’ generalization fetish.

group theory: Probably masochists? It’s hard to imagine how else someone could be motivated to read a thousand-page paper, let alone write one.

operator algebras: Seems cool but I can’t understand a word of it, so I can’t be sure they’re not just bullshitting the whole thing.

commutative/homological algebra: Diagram chases are of the devil, and these people are his worshipers.

meanwhile typical conversations between my friends:

– so what do you do in math?

– differential equations

– ugh I always hated differential equations

– you?

– general topology

– ugh I always hated topology

The curse of a mathematician is to work in a disliked field

Quatrefoil Knot

god I hate when people do that. bonus points for "so the exam was super easy. what did you get?"

Hi ppl who are nosy and want to know ur grades so they can judge how smart u are are annoying as fuck

I know we all have different skills and all and it's supposed to be complementary, but, people who can do math are so morbidly funny to me

I figure it must be like

Imagine being like only one of twelve people in your whole city who can read and write

And it's not just because everyone else is uneducated, most of them cannot even learn the sort of things you can learn. Or they could, in theory, but it frustrates them so much that they never make it past grade school reading tops, and they hate every second of it

And it's not a "luxury" skill, either, like your whole society needs the written word to function, and by extension, they need you. They need you for shit like reading labels and instruction manuals and writting 2 sentences letters, and they pay you handsomely for that, which is nice, but also feels absurd

You read a whole series of novels that rock your life and you can't even talk about it to your best friend because anything more complex than a picture book breaks their brain